I think numeric priorities would become pretty unmanageable if they had
global significance rather than applying only locally within a module.
That's the only reason I can think of.

There are all sorts of things one could do to improve the modularity of XSLT
- public/private attributes on variables and named templates, template
priority linked to the schema type hierarchy, syntactically-scoped template
rules, template rules linked to a stage in a pipeline, etc: but none of them
is really compelling in my view. 

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/ 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Welch [mailto:ajwelch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 31 January 2005 11:12
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [xsl] Priority and import precedence
> 
> 
> It seems the priority attribute on a template is of less 
> importance than
> the order in which stylesheets are imported, when using
> xsl:apply-imports.
> 
> For example, if stylesheet A imports stylesheets B and C (in that
> order), templates in B will always be selected over C regardless of
> priority.
> 
> Is there a reason for this?  (It seems strange as usually the 
> 'one that
> comes last' selection process is the last resort, not the first)
> 
> cheers
> andrew